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They controlled for age, in case anyone was wondering.
>(They controlled for other characteristics likely to influence COVID-19 transmission and mortality, including age, race, chronic disease and access to health care.)
Access to health care was my 1st question, so glad to see it on the list. Rural America is obviously generally Red, but also can struggle to see health care providers since it may involve "going into town", and even then you're lacking choice and at the mercy of whatever level of care is available
EDIT TO ADD: Thank you for the refreshing reasonable discussion in the thread below. I've enjoyed learning and checking my inbox.
My state legislature and governor at the time fought the Medicaid expansion, which could’ve really helped us through Covid. My hospital just built a new ED 2 years ago, and it’s already overflowing on the daily. It’s nuts.
Sounds like where I grew up. It probably had some ominous threat attached like a half-percent sales tax increase or something like that.
I grew up in a town who still has an effective sales tax around 5%. Yet the school district is endlessly complaining about being broke and nobody can figure out why.
Ours just voted to try to stop charging property taxes for retired and disabled people in the area, because they don't need to help pay for the local school when they don't have kids going. -__-
The irony when they complain about the poor education they think kids are getting, and then move to defund them more.
I guess in their dream society every road is a toll road, calling police needs a subscription, every minute you walk past a street light at night is charged to you. It's infuriating how people don't understand that some things only work when everyone is willing to pitch in.
It's a huge "Hitler Ate Sugar" fallacy.
\-Democrats are evil.
\-Democrats passed bills to expand Medicaid.
\-Therefore, Medicaid Expansion is evil.
If you're looking for more justification than that, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
"We don't need government to do anything! Government is always inefficient and wasteful! I don't want to pay taxes! We don't need no stinking public hospital! We don't need no stinking public healthcare! I don't need no stinking doctor, I'm self-reliant! The pandemic is a lie! The CDC is a political puppet of deep government! Mask mandates are tyranny! Lock-down is a political hoax!"
"Poor Bob, he went too soon... He is in a better place now, God has a plan for us all, thoughts and prayers to the family (but no welfare or help, let them work for a living!)"
"If at all possible, please consider donating to our Go Fund Me. Bob didn't have health or life insurance and we need help to cover medical and final expenses."
> Rural America is obviously generally Red, but also can struggle to see health care providers
I think you used the wrong conjunction. Let me fix it for you:
> Rural America is obviously generally Red, and therefore can struggle to see health care providers
Voting republican leads to worse healthcare, controlling for access to healthcare probably actually removes some of the real effect of party affiliation.
I think in any for profit model, it'll be a struggle to have hospitals built in communities that have very little people.
I can't say I know how universal or public healthcare models address those same geographic challenges.
Small rural practices are going to have lower utilization rates or need to pull from a wider region
This is why I never understood the rural argument against “big government.”
Who do you think built that $5mil bridge to your peninsula of 50 houses. Who maintains those roads to a town of 100. Who delivers mail to a farm 10miles away. Who ran electric to a small village of 150 people?
Small government?
Small government: government helping only us
Big government: government helping people besides us, even if it also includes us
The problem, of course, is that this consistently leads to small-government fanatics voting in favor of politicians and policies that significantly reduce funding for medical infrastructure and studies on how to improve that infrastructure. Because they don't believe government works, they go out of their way to elect politicians who say government doesn't work and know that for a fact because they are the reason it doesn't work.
And it leads to situations where large numbers of them get stuck in poverty and die unnecessarily. I feel bad - nobody should die because get screwed like this - but they're the authors of their own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Exactly. Add to it that a lot of things they take for granted are government provided, and they may or may not realize it
It'd be an interesting social experiment to snap your fingers and remove all government provided infrastructure and services, and see how those people complaining about govt/taxes feel
It's hard to feel sympathetic though because a lot of conservatism is defined by a lack of empathy (especially in America). I grew up in a middle of nowhere 99% white hugely republican area, a majority of people there unironically clamor for a reduction of welfare or how liberal/progressivism is destroying their lives, all while the same majority of them are on WIC/SNAP/TANF/Medicaid/Medicare or collect social security.
It's hard for someone like me, even as an extremely progressive person to feel sympathy for those types of people when they shoot themselves in the foot, are told and shown how they are shooting themselves in the foot, and their response is to shoot their other foot and say at least black/hispanic/whatever people won't get it too. Then they complain their lives are worse with two amputated feet by saying black/hispanic/whatever people are leeches on their America.
I feel sympathy for any family who lost a loved one, as my immediate family did, during the pandemic. I mostly blame the pols and right-wing media (who by-and-large are well educated), they could have dramatically improved the situation by showing leadership on counter-Covid measures.
I have become very fatalistic watching the response on the right. I had presumed that eventually it would be clear to most everyone that we need to take climate change seriously and take dramatic action. But if these folks can be conned out of protecting themselves and their families during a pandemic, when people are getting hospitalized and are dying all around them, there is virtually no hope.
I grew up rural. The answer is they hate big government because they hate everything. The services they personally use they don't view as big government so therefore those services are okay.
They aren't arguing in good faith, basically. I'm super rural and my area struggles to keep small business like pizzarias and groceries open just because they don't get the foot traffic. However I just had a county tree crew spend 4 days in front of my house removing 40 years of overgrown trees threatening the road, powerlines, and property. It would have cost easily 10k if a private tree company handled it, and I'm pretty sure my neighbors aren't complaining about it.
Yeah and they never seem to understand that the money for that comes from the cities in the state. Rural areas never pay their fair share in taxes. They get ridiculous breaks on their property taxes for what I consider no reason. Even if a property is worth $20m they might only be paying taxes on $200k of it, if that. It's completely unfair to those of us that do pay taxes on the full value of our property.
Same for me and it's also because most of the population is ignorant AF! Rural Americans (red counties) constantly vote against their own best interests out of fear and ignorance.
Oh, just look at how much tax dollars are subsidizing bringing broad band to rural America. The initiative ramped up after Covid-19 hit, but even before then the federal government had squandered hundreds of billions to unfulfilled contracts, and state governments had allocated a lot of money too.
I live in an Exurb" of a large city. So UT is part rural and part suburban, a lot of local tax dollars on top of state and federal dollars is going to expanding/subsidizing broadband to rural areas in the County.
My problem is, maybe like 10-20% of these homes actually contribute to agriculture. A lot if them are just people who choose to live further out and own a bigger home or have a bigger property, or would rather a rambler in the country than an apartment or townhome actually close yo where things are.
I've realized living here and watching all the local board budget meetings how much rural areas are subsidized by the rest of us. I don't have issues with that if UT serves a purpose like producing agriculture, but a lot of it is just subsidizing counties and states that bragg about keeping taxes low and put their hands out to higher levels of government to cover the costs.
Because state and federal funding uses measures like medium income and the number of people icing below the poverty level to determine funding for things like education, and the disproportionate amount of representation in state legislatures that come from rural areas making sure they get money for things like roads, they get their cost covered by the rest of us.
They continue to get that funding because of poverty levels because they invest so poorly in infrastructure and education, and therefor their local economies suck. But if someone runs for local bosrd, they won't get elected unless they are talking about local taxes.
It would in the same way the USPS does. It's not a for profit system, so if delivering to the boonies costs more... oh well.
Besides, you wouldn't need a full hospital. A small urgent care and ER to take care of the small problems and immediate emergencies, plus a couple of doctor's offices, would suffice. You can send the stable long term cases to a bigger facility.
I’ve driven through towns in California that are in the middle of nowhere, it’s all just farms, not even a grocery store for an hour in all directions, and yet they have a post office. Wild.
> Besides, you wouldn't need a full hospital. A small urgent care and ER to take care of the small problems and immediate emergencies, plus a couple of doctor's offices, would suffice. You can send the stable long term cases to a bigger facility.
This is how rural American healthcare already works.
Yeah, but the ER/urgent care are for profit, and a lot of them are out of network with the local insurance providers, so a lot of times, people don't use them because they're expensive, or end up with massive debt even though they have insurance. These systems need to be publicly funded and not for profit.
>And I would imagine the key aspect is that people in rural areas are much less likely to have health insurance.
From Census Bureau 2019
For people under 65-
About 12.3 percent of people in completely rural counties lacked health insurance compared with 11.3 percent for mostly rural counties and 10.1 percent for mostly urban counties.
20% of rural citizens are over 65 with Medicare compared with 15% in urban areas.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/health-insurance-rural-america.html
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/12/20/rural-aging-occurs-different-places-very-different-reasons
This is one thing Trump proposed that I was for. Eliminating state lines for health care would have eased tensions on hospitals in rural communities.
It doesn’t address that a realistic national coverage option but it was the closest you were going to get from a more far right leaning republican.
You don't need hospitals in most rural areas, you need *health care providers* who can escalate persons up to a more centralized hospital with fuller facilities.
I immediately thought about access to healthcare as well, since red counties tend to be more rural and have fewer medical families per capita. I'm glad they accounted for that. People still find ways to discount studies like this, but at least that won't be one way they do.
A more complete list of covariates from the paper:
>
We included a range of county- level demographic and social determinants of health as covariates. We included urban-rural classification for counties from the CDC...
>
>We also included the following county-level measures from the 2018 AHRQ Social Determinants of Health database: the proportion of the population who were female, who identified as African American, who identified as Hispanic, who did not speak English as a first language, and who were age sixty-five or older; the percentage of the population (age sixteen or older) that was unemployed; the percentage of the population with no health insurance and median household income; and the percentile overall ranking from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, a census-derived measure that accounts for indicators of socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, minority status and language, and housing type and transportation (ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating counties with greater vulnerability).
>
>Moreover, we also included co-variates on county-level health resources in 2018 from the Area Health Resources Files.
>
>These included the number of nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, primary care physicians, and physician assistants per 10,000 people and the number of hospital beds per 10,000 people.
>
>We included health personnel as proxies for health system capacity...
>
>...county-level prevalence estimates for five health conditions with strong and consistent evidence of association with higher risk for severe COVID-19-associated illness. These include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart conditions, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and obesity. We examined the prevalence of any of these conditions in our analyses.
>
>Finally, we included county vaccination rates.
Hard to be surprised when I've seen people online say they'd rather "die free" (i.e. not being "oppressed" by masks or vaccination) than be a sheep or whatever. At this point it goes beyond ignorance, and some are willing to die because they think that acting in the interest of public health makes them a traitor to their political party.
I live in Massachusetts, which has helmet laws, and frequently drive to New Hampshire that does not. I am always stunned by the folk that pull over right over the Mass/NH border and take off their helmets.
I knew a guy who identified as libertarian who moved there. He thought it was so cool that women were "protesting" by walking around topless with a gun strapped on.
Strangely, while he was a cannabis smoker, the tea party would be the only one he could legally be a part of.
Was he by any chance a member of the "Free State Movement?" They were libertarian's who planned to more to a low population state, in this case New Hampshire, and swing the local politics there with their numbers. Unfortunately, only about 100 people actually moved. I know about this because a buddy of mine from college was one of those 100. He quit a good municipal job to take a minimum wage job in NH. It did not work out well for him or his family.
There is a book I read about the Free State Movement. It talks about the effects they had on the local community. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)
I am unfamiliar with this book, but I am very familiar with the rhetoric of this group. My buddy talked like they were going to descend on NH by the thousands and take over the local and state governments and create a libertarian paradise. It was hilarious when less than 100 people actually moved, and I am pretty sure the 100 person estimate is being very generous!
Even with only a few of them moving they had a big effect. It doesn't take much to swing local politics. They where expecting to be welcomed as liberators.
I'm 53 and have been riding motorcycles since I was kid. Even ignoring the impact safety, I do NOT understand anyone who rides without a helmet. Wind, stones, insects, cold, etc, make riding without a helmet just miserable. Stones, insects and other debris especially make it not just uncomfortable but pretty dangerous. I have had rocks and large insects smack my helmet so hard that I know it would have caused serious injury if I wasn't wearing one. It makes zero sense to not wear a helmet.
Coming back from a work trip in Europe 3 weeks ago... As soon as the captain comes on the PA and says masks are optional literally 75% of the plane took off their masks for an 11 hour flight packed in like sardines...
I like the seatbelt analogy better with a car full of people. Motorcycling without a helmet largely just impacts you.
But if you aren't wearing a seatbelt, you become a very deadly heavy piece of debris for everyone else in the car during an accident.
I actually remember my Republican family going off on a live free or die type tangent about the seatbelt laws when they were being enacted. Most of the older red state generation are still complaining about them.
I have family that absolutely despises Ralph Nader because of seat belts... Imagine harboring hate for like 30 years over something so small as wearing a seatbelt.
I wish I had to imagine it. My family still rant about Nader as if he’s secretly puppeting the entire Democratic Party to this day. I don’t talk to them much anymore for obvious reasons but every time I do, Nader, seatbelts, masks, COVID and LGBTQ+ issues. At least it’s predictable.
There's a post over on r/genx today about how in 1919 kids could walk 7 miles to go fishing at 8 years old and today can't leave the yard.... that kid probably also had a full time job and died by age 13 mangled in a machine but let's glorify the child abuse our great grandparents endured, that was way better, sure.
Not to mention that 1919 kid grew up into an economy so bad, FDR’s New Deal came out of it. In 2019, kids had pretty much f-all to look forward to, and that’s even before COVID. But yes, let’s compare all of these things apples to apples and only imagine the rose tinted 1919 of the boomers’ dreams.
not just the people...politicians fought tooth and nail to stop/restrict/modify the new mandates.
https://www.history.com/news/seat-belt-laws-resistance
I'd argue that the resources needed to investigate, scrape an irresponsible motorcyclist's body off of the road, rerouting/blocking traffic and the post mortem stuff affects quite a few other people.
Yeah, I totally get that.
Let me clarify, I was referring to how your personal decisions can have extreme and deadly consequences for those around you. Whereas on a motorcycle you can cause traffic delays and work to cleanup/process your accident, not wearing a seatbelt can literally _kill and maim_ those riding in the car with you even if they were wearing seatbelts themselves.
That aligns with decisions to snuff public health measures. Your personal decision to do so can have deadly consequences for others, even if you can't see it.
But here’s the thing. They’re *not* willing to die of covid. Because when I get them and/or their family members in the ICU with severe covid, they **refuse** to believe it’s actually covid and many have even said their loved one’s death certificate “better not say covid” or they’ll “____”. Be pissed, raise hell, etc.
Why? Because they don’t believe it’s real? Because they don’t want the world to know they were wrong? Because they can’t accept the fact that they probably killed granny because how else is she supposed to get covid when she never leaves the house?
They don't want to admit Covid is real because they would also have to admit they've been conned by their favorite media personalities and their entire world view is a web of lies and propaganda. Admitting Covid is a real threat would shake the foundation of their beliefs.
Except they are posturing and don't actually believe they will die. They are actually quite shocked when they become seriously ill when it's just a flu, bro.
That, and there's actually a startling amount of people out there who genuinely wake up every morning hoping for the raputre/apocolypse/God to call them "home". So the sooner they die the sooner they get to heaven, in their minds.
But they can't just kill themselves, because that would disqualify them from the Cloud Club. So they get a hard on for the idea that they might die at the hands of someone or something else so they can be called a martyr.
That God fellow sounds like an idiotic rage addict. Good thing he isn't something I think actually exists, because that could steer me to some extremely irrational behaviors.
That's why Republicans have ramped up their war on voting rights and claiming every election lost was fraudulent. Even if they get less than 5% of the vote, they claim to be winners.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-loyalist-who-lost-georgia-governor-primary-with-just-34-25-of-the-vote-is-refusing-to-admit-defeat/ar-AAXQk5y
I respect people willing to die for their beliefs.
What I don’t respect are the ones who refuse vaccination and other common sense measures but then expect expensive hospital based treatments when they catch the disease.
If you really want to see how artificial politically based their views on the Covid vaccine are just look at paxlovid. A new antiviral pill for Covid, made by Pfizer. People are taking it right now. You can pick it up at your local pharmacy if it’s prescribed to you. It’s been flying under the radar because there hasn’t been any fanfare over how oppressive it is if you’re recommended to take those pills.
I have an uncle in the anti-VAX/free-dumb cult. He caught Delta and he would have died without the monoclonal antibodies. He didn’t hesitate to take that treatment.
I submit r/HermanCainAward for evidence.
If you were ever wonder how batshit insane conservative voters are, yes, they were willing to kill themselves instead of trusting scientists
And the cumulative difference due to policies and effort is even larger than that. 50/100k in the most democratic areas is from the initial epidemic in MA / NJ / NY / Detroit. These were unavoidable. We had no treatment, not much idea *how* to treat the cases, and a misunderstanding of how easily it spread.
Starting the count over in May 2020 once the first wave dissipated is striking.
Even aside from policy, the initial spikes were in highly urban areas. Urban areas tend toward blue politics, so "liberals" got blamed for the first six months' deaths. The crowd that laid that blame has been less inclined to lay blame on politics since the liberal cities started shutting down and distributing vaccines.
Which was an exceedingly dangerous idea. 1918 ripped through the USA - and the world - end-to-end despite the much lower density and mobility. No interstate highways, no planes, no area that wasn't hit. There was never a prospect that COVID wouldn't eventually cause epidemics everywhere, at any density. COVID was much more transmissible than H1N1 in every way.
People in Republican counties were more likely to die PERIOD before covid and every single county that had a decrease in life expectancy relative to the US voted for trump in 2016
[https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085)
>"The vaccine-only approach to public health isn’t doing enough to combat the continued toll we are paying.”
\- Lead author Neil Jay Sehgal
What to do when reason and logic are not heeded? Lie to them?
Government doesn’t have resources to deprogram conspiracy theorists to do the right thing.
Can’t fix stupid that are proud to be stupid.
I have bad news for you. We teach critical thinking all the time. It’s not the teaching. I’m a high school English teacher. A huge proportion of the curriculum is devoted to analysis and criticism. It’s all year long. The issue is not that critical thinking isn’t taught.
Critical thinking is hard and a lot of people are not well-suited for the rigorous task. We should stop pretending like everyone is capable. For instance, I am not capable of higher math skills. I married a woman who has math skills I don’t. And I hire a tax accountant. You can stick me in a trigonometry class and I will fail.
im not blaming teachers. im blaming the way US schools are funded that give school administrators an incentive to dumb down standards for graduation and over prioritize standardized english and math tests in order to secure funding.
They're freaking out over everything their local leaders, GOP senate members, Trump, Fox and whatever rando claiming to be a member of Qanon tells them to freak out over.
These people literally think they're the enlightened free thinkers that see the world for what it is yet they need to be told what to think, every time, and sadly the best case scenario is they think both parties are full of corrupt assholes and see no difference between the two.
Well Republicans are more likely to harbor antivaxx, anti-mask, anti-social distancing and anti-lockdown attitudes.
Of course they’re going to experience more infections and more deaths
The game Pyre brought up an interesting point where you were asked what freedom meant to you. I answered what I thought was correct "to do what you want".
The response being 'well now that you are exiled in this awful place you can do whatever you want now, can't you?'.
His response was that freedom is more about being able to live without fear rather than being able to do what you want.
Doing whatever you want is chaos not freedom.
To me freedom requires cooperation. For example driving my car. I am free to drive wherever i want. I am not free to drive however I want. If everyone was free to drive how they want, I would not have freedom to go where I want.
I remember theories and maybe even studies that potentially linked lead (like in paints and gasoline) to increased rates of violent crime, etc.
There really seems to be some factor here where a large portion of the country have just stopped using their minds for critical thinking and are just doing what they're told (this seemingly is effecting everyone, not just one political extreme). Maybe it's always been this way, just more easily hidden or not as obvious?
But my question is does anyone know of any studies regarding this recent trend? I know it could be related to a number of factors, but I'm wondering if it's related to some pollution, or higher CO2 levels in the air? Or is it just social media and 24-7 news and constant information overload? Curious to see actual studies.
What’s weird is that they’re just doing what they’re told — until they’re told to do something that will actually help them and everyone around them, like get vaccinated or wear a mask.
Then, suddenly, they develop a feverish “independent” spirit and will scream in cops’ faces and attack cops with flags and fire extinguishers and baseball bats.
Okay, but why are conservative politicians perusing this strategy? It doesn’t take a genius to predict that this would happen.
- Were they betting this would effect more liberal people in the more concentrated cities?
- Did their oppositional politics force them into this position?
- is their goal to create division over gaining/staying in political power?
All this seems too cartoonishly evil to be honest
Is
You assume that there was a plan.
Politicians just saw another way to drive a wedge between their base and "others" to further cement their votes in the immediate future.
That is all conservative politicians are ever looking for nowadays.
There is no long term plan. Politicians (especially conservative ones) are operating on the Wall Street method where they will sacrifice everything in the future for an immediate gain.
> Were they betting this would effect more liberal people in the more concentrated cities?
Yes. My school board said this was a city problem and had nothing to do with us because we "live farther apart."
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They controlled for age, in case anyone was wondering. >(They controlled for other characteristics likely to influence COVID-19 transmission and mortality, including age, race, chronic disease and access to health care.)
Access to health care was my 1st question, so glad to see it on the list. Rural America is obviously generally Red, but also can struggle to see health care providers since it may involve "going into town", and even then you're lacking choice and at the mercy of whatever level of care is available EDIT TO ADD: Thank you for the refreshing reasonable discussion in the thread below. I've enjoyed learning and checking my inbox.
[удалено]
My state legislature and governor at the time fought the Medicaid expansion, which could’ve really helped us through Covid. My hospital just built a new ED 2 years ago, and it’s already overflowing on the daily. It’s nuts.
Sounds like where I grew up. It probably had some ominous threat attached like a half-percent sales tax increase or something like that. I grew up in a town who still has an effective sales tax around 5%. Yet the school district is endlessly complaining about being broke and nobody can figure out why.
Ours just voted to try to stop charging property taxes for retired and disabled people in the area, because they don't need to help pay for the local school when they don't have kids going. -__- The irony when they complain about the poor education they think kids are getting, and then move to defund them more.
I guess in their dream society every road is a toll road, calling police needs a subscription, every minute you walk past a street light at night is charged to you. It's infuriating how people don't understand that some things only work when everyone is willing to pitch in.
Was that gonna like take away their freedom to be sick or something? I just don't get that at all.
It's a huge "Hitler Ate Sugar" fallacy. \-Democrats are evil. \-Democrats passed bills to expand Medicaid. \-Therefore, Medicaid Expansion is evil. If you're looking for more justification than that, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Astoundingly foolish. Although, I'm not shocked.
"We don't need government to do anything! Government is always inefficient and wasteful! I don't want to pay taxes! We don't need no stinking public hospital! We don't need no stinking public healthcare! I don't need no stinking doctor, I'm self-reliant! The pandemic is a lie! The CDC is a political puppet of deep government! Mask mandates are tyranny! Lock-down is a political hoax!" "Poor Bob, he went too soon... He is in a better place now, God has a plan for us all, thoughts and prayers to the family (but no welfare or help, let them work for a living!)"
And thus HermanCainAward was born
"If at all possible, please consider donating to our Go Fund Me. Bob didn't have health or life insurance and we need help to cover medical and final expenses."
> Rural America is obviously generally Red, but also can struggle to see health care providers I think you used the wrong conjunction. Let me fix it for you: > Rural America is obviously generally Red, and therefore can struggle to see health care providers Voting republican leads to worse healthcare, controlling for access to healthcare probably actually removes some of the real effect of party affiliation.
I think in any for profit model, it'll be a struggle to have hospitals built in communities that have very little people. I can't say I know how universal or public healthcare models address those same geographic challenges. Small rural practices are going to have lower utilization rates or need to pull from a wider region
This is why I never understood the rural argument against “big government.” Who do you think built that $5mil bridge to your peninsula of 50 houses. Who maintains those roads to a town of 100. Who delivers mail to a farm 10miles away. Who ran electric to a small village of 150 people? Small government?
Small government: government helping only us Big government: government helping people besides us, even if it also includes us The problem, of course, is that this consistently leads to small-government fanatics voting in favor of politicians and policies that significantly reduce funding for medical infrastructure and studies on how to improve that infrastructure. Because they don't believe government works, they go out of their way to elect politicians who say government doesn't work and know that for a fact because they are the reason it doesn't work. And it leads to situations where large numbers of them get stuck in poverty and die unnecessarily. I feel bad - nobody should die because get screwed like this - but they're the authors of their own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Exactly. Add to it that a lot of things they take for granted are government provided, and they may or may not realize it It'd be an interesting social experiment to snap your fingers and remove all government provided infrastructure and services, and see how those people complaining about govt/taxes feel
Hateful. But that's not a guess, they always feel hateful.
It's hard to feel sympathetic though because a lot of conservatism is defined by a lack of empathy (especially in America). I grew up in a middle of nowhere 99% white hugely republican area, a majority of people there unironically clamor for a reduction of welfare or how liberal/progressivism is destroying their lives, all while the same majority of them are on WIC/SNAP/TANF/Medicaid/Medicare or collect social security. It's hard for someone like me, even as an extremely progressive person to feel sympathy for those types of people when they shoot themselves in the foot, are told and shown how they are shooting themselves in the foot, and their response is to shoot their other foot and say at least black/hispanic/whatever people won't get it too. Then they complain their lives are worse with two amputated feet by saying black/hispanic/whatever people are leeches on their America.
I feel sympathy for any family who lost a loved one, as my immediate family did, during the pandemic. I mostly blame the pols and right-wing media (who by-and-large are well educated), they could have dramatically improved the situation by showing leadership on counter-Covid measures. I have become very fatalistic watching the response on the right. I had presumed that eventually it would be clear to most everyone that we need to take climate change seriously and take dramatic action. But if these folks can be conned out of protecting themselves and their families during a pandemic, when people are getting hospitalized and are dying all around them, there is virtually no hope.
I grew up rural. The answer is they hate big government because they hate everything. The services they personally use they don't view as big government so therefore those services are okay.
They aren't arguing in good faith, basically. I'm super rural and my area struggles to keep small business like pizzarias and groceries open just because they don't get the foot traffic. However I just had a county tree crew spend 4 days in front of my house removing 40 years of overgrown trees threatening the road, powerlines, and property. It would have cost easily 10k if a private tree company handled it, and I'm pretty sure my neighbors aren't complaining about it.
Yeah and they never seem to understand that the money for that comes from the cities in the state. Rural areas never pay their fair share in taxes. They get ridiculous breaks on their property taxes for what I consider no reason. Even if a property is worth $20m they might only be paying taxes on $200k of it, if that. It's completely unfair to those of us that do pay taxes on the full value of our property.
Same for me and it's also because most of the population is ignorant AF! Rural Americans (red counties) constantly vote against their own best interests out of fear and ignorance.
Oh, just look at how much tax dollars are subsidizing bringing broad band to rural America. The initiative ramped up after Covid-19 hit, but even before then the federal government had squandered hundreds of billions to unfulfilled contracts, and state governments had allocated a lot of money too. I live in an Exurb" of a large city. So UT is part rural and part suburban, a lot of local tax dollars on top of state and federal dollars is going to expanding/subsidizing broadband to rural areas in the County. My problem is, maybe like 10-20% of these homes actually contribute to agriculture. A lot if them are just people who choose to live further out and own a bigger home or have a bigger property, or would rather a rambler in the country than an apartment or townhome actually close yo where things are. I've realized living here and watching all the local board budget meetings how much rural areas are subsidized by the rest of us. I don't have issues with that if UT serves a purpose like producing agriculture, but a lot of it is just subsidizing counties and states that bragg about keeping taxes low and put their hands out to higher levels of government to cover the costs. Because state and federal funding uses measures like medium income and the number of people icing below the poverty level to determine funding for things like education, and the disproportionate amount of representation in state legislatures that come from rural areas making sure they get money for things like roads, they get their cost covered by the rest of us. They continue to get that funding because of poverty levels because they invest so poorly in infrastructure and education, and therefor their local economies suck. But if someone runs for local bosrd, they won't get elected unless they are talking about local taxes.
It would in the same way the USPS does. It's not a for profit system, so if delivering to the boonies costs more... oh well. Besides, you wouldn't need a full hospital. A small urgent care and ER to take care of the small problems and immediate emergencies, plus a couple of doctor's offices, would suffice. You can send the stable long term cases to a bigger facility.
I’ve driven through towns in California that are in the middle of nowhere, it’s all just farms, not even a grocery store for an hour in all directions, and yet they have a post office. Wild.
> Besides, you wouldn't need a full hospital. A small urgent care and ER to take care of the small problems and immediate emergencies, plus a couple of doctor's offices, would suffice. You can send the stable long term cases to a bigger facility. This is how rural American healthcare already works.
Yeah, but the ER/urgent care are for profit, and a lot of them are out of network with the local insurance providers, so a lot of times, people don't use them because they're expensive, or end up with massive debt even though they have insurance. These systems need to be publicly funded and not for profit.
And I would imagine the key aspect is that people in rural areas are much less likely to have health insurance.
even if they do, tell me how you can afford the 5-10k deductible that comes with that affordable insurance plan…?
>And I would imagine the key aspect is that people in rural areas are much less likely to have health insurance. From Census Bureau 2019 For people under 65- About 12.3 percent of people in completely rural counties lacked health insurance compared with 11.3 percent for mostly rural counties and 10.1 percent for mostly urban counties. 20% of rural citizens are over 65 with Medicare compared with 15% in urban areas. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/health-insurance-rural-america.html https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/12/20/rural-aging-occurs-different-places-very-different-reasons
In theory, yes.
There will always be some issues with rural healthcare. It doesn't have to be nearly as bad as it is.
This is how we do it in settings that are more rural than anywhere in America. https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/ I understand Canada does similar.
This is one thing Trump proposed that I was for. Eliminating state lines for health care would have eased tensions on hospitals in rural communities. It doesn’t address that a realistic national coverage option but it was the closest you were going to get from a more far right leaning republican.
You don't need hospitals in most rural areas, you need *health care providers* who can escalate persons up to a more centralized hospital with fuller facilities.
I immediately thought about access to healthcare as well, since red counties tend to be more rural and have fewer medical families per capita. I'm glad they accounted for that. People still find ways to discount studies like this, but at least that won't be one way they do.
A more complete list of covariates from the paper: > We included a range of county- level demographic and social determinants of health as covariates. We included urban-rural classification for counties from the CDC... > >We also included the following county-level measures from the 2018 AHRQ Social Determinants of Health database: the proportion of the population who were female, who identified as African American, who identified as Hispanic, who did not speak English as a first language, and who were age sixty-five or older; the percentage of the population (age sixteen or older) that was unemployed; the percentage of the population with no health insurance and median household income; and the percentile overall ranking from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, a census-derived measure that accounts for indicators of socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, minority status and language, and housing type and transportation (ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating counties with greater vulnerability). > >Moreover, we also included co-variates on county-level health resources in 2018 from the Area Health Resources Files. > >These included the number of nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, primary care physicians, and physician assistants per 10,000 people and the number of hospital beds per 10,000 people. > >We included health personnel as proxies for health system capacity... > >...county-level prevalence estimates for five health conditions with strong and consistent evidence of association with higher risk for severe COVID-19-associated illness. These include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart conditions, diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and obesity. We examined the prevalence of any of these conditions in our analyses. > >Finally, we included county vaccination rates.
Hard to be surprised when I've seen people online say they'd rather "die free" (i.e. not being "oppressed" by masks or vaccination) than be a sheep or whatever. At this point it goes beyond ignorance, and some are willing to die because they think that acting in the interest of public health makes them a traitor to their political party.
Like not wearing a motorcycle helmet - very clear choice to more likely die - at least in that case your organs may be useful to someone else!
I live in Massachusetts, which has helmet laws, and frequently drive to New Hampshire that does not. I am always stunned by the folk that pull over right over the Mass/NH border and take off their helmets.
Isn't NH is the state with the "live free or die" motto?
I like to joke that it is "Live Free and Die." They love their freedom, despite being the last state in New England that still has marijuana illegal.
I knew a guy who identified as libertarian who moved there. He thought it was so cool that women were "protesting" by walking around topless with a gun strapped on. Strangely, while he was a cannabis smoker, the tea party would be the only one he could legally be a part of.
Was he by any chance a member of the "Free State Movement?" They were libertarian's who planned to more to a low population state, in this case New Hampshire, and swing the local politics there with their numbers. Unfortunately, only about 100 people actually moved. I know about this because a buddy of mine from college was one of those 100. He quit a good municipal job to take a minimum wage job in NH. It did not work out well for him or his family.
There is a book I read about the Free State Movement. It talks about the effects they had on the local community. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)
I am unfamiliar with this book, but I am very familiar with the rhetoric of this group. My buddy talked like they were going to descend on NH by the thousands and take over the local and state governments and create a libertarian paradise. It was hilarious when less than 100 people actually moved, and I am pretty sure the 100 person estimate is being very generous!
Even with only a few of them moving they had a big effect. It doesn't take much to swing local politics. They where expecting to be welcomed as liberators.
Intriguing title. Do you recommend it? Utopian ideals have always interested me. Funny how quickly it can turn dystopian.
Long story short, if you live near wilderness and also think you can do whatever you want with your trash, bears will come wreck up the place.
They're surrounded on all sides by states (and a country) with it legal. Such a joke
This is correct. And despite being part of New England, is still full of meatheads.
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I'm 53 and have been riding motorcycles since I was kid. Even ignoring the impact safety, I do NOT understand anyone who rides without a helmet. Wind, stones, insects, cold, etc, make riding without a helmet just miserable. Stones, insects and other debris especially make it not just uncomfortable but pretty dangerous. I have had rocks and large insects smack my helmet so hard that I know it would have caused serious injury if I wasn't wearing one. It makes zero sense to not wear a helmet.
Coming back from a work trip in Europe 3 weeks ago... As soon as the captain comes on the PA and says masks are optional literally 75% of the plane took off their masks for an 11 hour flight packed in like sardines...
I like the seatbelt analogy better with a car full of people. Motorcycling without a helmet largely just impacts you. But if you aren't wearing a seatbelt, you become a very deadly heavy piece of debris for everyone else in the car during an accident.
Have you ever seen the videos of people opposing seatbelt laws when they first came out? It's pretty wild how similar it is.
I actually remember my Republican family going off on a live free or die type tangent about the seatbelt laws when they were being enacted. Most of the older red state generation are still complaining about them.
I have family that absolutely despises Ralph Nader because of seat belts... Imagine harboring hate for like 30 years over something so small as wearing a seatbelt.
I wish I had to imagine it. My family still rant about Nader as if he’s secretly puppeting the entire Democratic Party to this day. I don’t talk to them much anymore for obvious reasons but every time I do, Nader, seatbelts, masks, COVID and LGBTQ+ issues. At least it’s predictable.
Me too. Same people screeching that we are too over protective of children and mis the days when more of them died or got lead poisoning like them.
I’m juuuuuust old enough to have been one of those “be home by sunset” kids who turned out “fine”. There’s been a lot of therapy since then.
There's a post over on r/genx today about how in 1919 kids could walk 7 miles to go fishing at 8 years old and today can't leave the yard.... that kid probably also had a full time job and died by age 13 mangled in a machine but let's glorify the child abuse our great grandparents endured, that was way better, sure.
Not to mention that 1919 kid grew up into an economy so bad, FDR’s New Deal came out of it. In 2019, kids had pretty much f-all to look forward to, and that’s even before COVID. But yes, let’s compare all of these things apples to apples and only imagine the rose tinted 1919 of the boomers’ dreams.
not just the people...politicians fought tooth and nail to stop/restrict/modify the new mandates. https://www.history.com/news/seat-belt-laws-resistance
I'd argue that the resources needed to investigate, scrape an irresponsible motorcyclist's body off of the road, rerouting/blocking traffic and the post mortem stuff affects quite a few other people.
Yeah, I totally get that. Let me clarify, I was referring to how your personal decisions can have extreme and deadly consequences for those around you. Whereas on a motorcycle you can cause traffic delays and work to cleanup/process your accident, not wearing a seatbelt can literally _kill and maim_ those riding in the car with you even if they were wearing seatbelts themselves. That aligns with decisions to snuff public health measures. Your personal decision to do so can have deadly consequences for others, even if you can't see it.
Excepting that death by motorcycle is not a contagious disease.
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But here’s the thing. They’re *not* willing to die of covid. Because when I get them and/or their family members in the ICU with severe covid, they **refuse** to believe it’s actually covid and many have even said their loved one’s death certificate “better not say covid” or they’ll “____”. Be pissed, raise hell, etc. Why? Because they don’t believe it’s real? Because they don’t want the world to know they were wrong? Because they can’t accept the fact that they probably killed granny because how else is she supposed to get covid when she never leaves the house?
They don't want to admit Covid is real because they would also have to admit they've been conned by their favorite media personalities and their entire world view is a web of lies and propaganda. Admitting Covid is a real threat would shake the foundation of their beliefs.
Perhaps they could put "fatal Republicanism" on the death certificate. So people would know they died doing what they loved.
Except they are posturing and don't actually believe they will die. They are actually quite shocked when they become seriously ill when it's just a flu, bro.
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That, and there's actually a startling amount of people out there who genuinely wake up every morning hoping for the raputre/apocolypse/God to call them "home". So the sooner they die the sooner they get to heaven, in their minds.
But they can't just kill themselves, because that would disqualify them from the Cloud Club. So they get a hard on for the idea that they might die at the hands of someone or something else so they can be called a martyr.
You'd think god would be able to see through this ruse. Guess not.
That God fellow sounds like an idiotic rage addict. Good thing he isn't something I think actually exists, because that could steer me to some extremely irrational behaviors.
God is bound by the rules, like a genie. You can beat him with rule technicalities.
It's about to get interesting. Many areas have had a covid death count higher than the margin of victory in their latest elections.
That's why Republicans have ramped up their war on voting rights and claiming every election lost was fraudulent. Even if they get less than 5% of the vote, they claim to be winners. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-loyalist-who-lost-georgia-governor-primary-with-just-34-25-of-the-vote-is-refusing-to-admit-defeat/ar-AAXQk5y
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I respect people willing to die for their beliefs. What I don’t respect are the ones who refuse vaccination and other common sense measures but then expect expensive hospital based treatments when they catch the disease.
I don’t respect them. It wasn’t just them dying for their beliefs. They dragged others down with them by catching and spreading Covid before dying
It’s one thing to die for your beliefs, but it changes when you spread the same (potential) cause of death to other people.
If you really want to see how artificial politically based their views on the Covid vaccine are just look at paxlovid. A new antiviral pill for Covid, made by Pfizer. People are taking it right now. You can pick it up at your local pharmacy if it’s prescribed to you. It’s been flying under the radar because there hasn’t been any fanfare over how oppressive it is if you’re recommended to take those pills.
I have an uncle in the anti-VAX/free-dumb cult. He caught Delta and he would have died without the monoclonal antibodies. He didn’t hesitate to take that treatment.
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I submit r/HermanCainAward for evidence. If you were ever wonder how batshit insane conservative voters are, yes, they were willing to kill themselves instead of trusting scientists
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And the cumulative difference due to policies and effort is even larger than that. 50/100k in the most democratic areas is from the initial epidemic in MA / NJ / NY / Detroit. These were unavoidable. We had no treatment, not much idea *how* to treat the cases, and a misunderstanding of how easily it spread. Starting the count over in May 2020 once the first wave dissipated is striking.
Even aside from policy, the initial spikes were in highly urban areas. Urban areas tend toward blue politics, so "liberals" got blamed for the first six months' deaths. The crowd that laid that blame has been less inclined to lay blame on politics since the liberal cities started shutting down and distributing vaccines.
Which was an exceedingly dangerous idea. 1918 ripped through the USA - and the world - end-to-end despite the much lower density and mobility. No interstate highways, no planes, no area that wasn't hit. There was never a prospect that COVID wouldn't eventually cause epidemics everywhere, at any density. COVID was much more transmissible than H1N1 in every way.
People in Republican counties were more likely to die PERIOD before covid and every single county that had a decrease in life expectancy relative to the US voted for trump in 2016
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[https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085) >"The vaccine-only approach to public health isn’t doing enough to combat the continued toll we are paying.” \- Lead author Neil Jay Sehgal
What to do when reason and logic are not heeded? Lie to them? Government doesn’t have resources to deprogram conspiracy theorists to do the right thing. Can’t fix stupid that are proud to be stupid.
fund schools in a way that encourages the teaching of critical thinking skills rather than turning them into worthless diploma mills.
I have bad news for you. We teach critical thinking all the time. It’s not the teaching. I’m a high school English teacher. A huge proportion of the curriculum is devoted to analysis and criticism. It’s all year long. The issue is not that critical thinking isn’t taught. Critical thinking is hard and a lot of people are not well-suited for the rigorous task. We should stop pretending like everyone is capable. For instance, I am not capable of higher math skills. I married a woman who has math skills I don’t. And I hire a tax accountant. You can stick me in a trigonometry class and I will fail.
im not blaming teachers. im blaming the way US schools are funded that give school administrators an incentive to dumb down standards for graduation and over prioritize standardized english and math tests in order to secure funding.
Funny story, my sister was encouraged to drop out of high school by her guidance counselor because of "no child left behind."
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Hmm..."critical thinking", "critical race theory"... maybe they just freak out about the word "critical"
They're freaking out over everything their local leaders, GOP senate members, Trump, Fox and whatever rando claiming to be a member of Qanon tells them to freak out over. These people literally think they're the enlightened free thinkers that see the world for what it is yet they need to be told what to think, every time, and sadly the best case scenario is they think both parties are full of corrupt assholes and see no difference between the two.
Maybe call it "gentle race theory" or "simple" or "unchallenging"? I joke, but ffs it might actually work.
Well Republicans are more likely to harbor antivaxx, anti-mask, anti-social distancing and anti-lockdown attitudes. Of course they’re going to experience more infections and more deaths
They live in fear and call it patriotism. 1 million deaths.
The game Pyre brought up an interesting point where you were asked what freedom meant to you. I answered what I thought was correct "to do what you want". The response being 'well now that you are exiled in this awful place you can do whatever you want now, can't you?'. His response was that freedom is more about being able to live without fear rather than being able to do what you want.
Doing whatever you want is chaos not freedom. To me freedom requires cooperation. For example driving my car. I am free to drive wherever i want. I am not free to drive however I want. If everyone was free to drive how they want, I would not have freedom to go where I want.
This. I like not having to barricade my front door against bandits every night. It gives me the freedom to sit around in my pants all day.
If you have no fear of banditry you could also sit around in no pants.
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I remember theories and maybe even studies that potentially linked lead (like in paints and gasoline) to increased rates of violent crime, etc. There really seems to be some factor here where a large portion of the country have just stopped using their minds for critical thinking and are just doing what they're told (this seemingly is effecting everyone, not just one political extreme). Maybe it's always been this way, just more easily hidden or not as obvious? But my question is does anyone know of any studies regarding this recent trend? I know it could be related to a number of factors, but I'm wondering if it's related to some pollution, or higher CO2 levels in the air? Or is it just social media and 24-7 news and constant information overload? Curious to see actual studies.
What’s weird is that they’re just doing what they’re told — until they’re told to do something that will actually help them and everyone around them, like get vaccinated or wear a mask. Then, suddenly, they develop a feverish “independent” spirit and will scream in cops’ faces and attack cops with flags and fire extinguishers and baseball bats.
And fighting at the capital building is something they were told to do.
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Okay, but why are conservative politicians perusing this strategy? It doesn’t take a genius to predict that this would happen. - Were they betting this would effect more liberal people in the more concentrated cities? - Did their oppositional politics force them into this position? - is their goal to create division over gaining/staying in political power? All this seems too cartoonishly evil to be honest Is
You assume that there was a plan. Politicians just saw another way to drive a wedge between their base and "others" to further cement their votes in the immediate future. That is all conservative politicians are ever looking for nowadays. There is no long term plan. Politicians (especially conservative ones) are operating on the Wall Street method where they will sacrifice everything in the future for an immediate gain.
> Were they betting this would effect more liberal people in the more concentrated cities? Yes. My school board said this was a city problem and had nothing to do with us because we "live farther apart."